Traversing,
in a beat shuffle
and worn cadence,
many oblique side streets
and shadow-stained back alleys
to arrive at where he now stood—
the white-hot lure
and rigged bait
of a suspect angel,
who played hard to get,
beckoned with an ineffable wink.
Visionary, cinematic shaman, and iconconclastic creative force, David Lynch was one of the most profound influences and inspirations in my life, someone whose work impacted me deep in my core and could move me to tears. Truly and thoroughly one of a kind. His spirit now travels through the Black/White Lodge and beyond. Journey well, maestro.
In 2018, I wrote a review/essay about David Lynch and his memoir, Room to Dream. To put words to the page, honoring this man’s work as an artist and cinematic phenomena, made me very happy. Here is the opening paragraph from that piece:
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.
— Edgar Allan Poe
For the past forty somewhat years, David Lynch has dreamscaped a long day’s journey into night, taking audiences on a hallucinated tour through the underworld of their own splintered psyche. In a world, or perhaps I should say industry, often bereft of visionary spellcasting, Lynch has been the equivalent of a cinematic shaman, a goofball deviant in bi-polar shades, trafficking in symbols, archetypes, glyphs, images and impressions, fished out from a fathomless substratum. His oeuvre, a steam-punk Frankenstein of interchangeable parts, speaks to the savvy and glee of a mad scientist at play, while his blending of the eternal with American pop has given us a surrealistic soap-opera with an eye toward the numinous. Carl Jung eating apple pie in a diner while riffing on anima with a gum-clacking waitress named Flo; the red-jacketed ghost of James Dean partying on top of a toxic mushroom cloud while Marilyn Monroe lip-syncs “Happy Birthday” in Yiddish; a blue jukebox isolated in the desert where it serves as an altar for a congregation of devout rabbits . . . these could be dispatches from a world of Lynch’s making.
One of my recent projects has been compiling stories and flash fiction into a collection titled: Lives in the Day Of. After selection, rewriting, and editing, the collection comprises twenty-two pieces, spanning the past fifteen years. Some of these works have appeared in different magazines, journals and anthologies (and some are scheduled for publication in 2025). I also plan to release audio and video recordings of select pieces this year.
We didn’t talk about it, but we knew we’d never amount to anything, no matter what we did. No matter how celebrated the accomplishment, no matter how big the fiction and the audience buying it, nothing could ever fill those holes deep down inside us, though we’d never relent, whistling past boneyards and shooting the breeze full of furious patter. We were, as my friend Joey once called us—The Dirtbags of the Universe. I’m not sure what prompted him to say it, probably just one of those acidic outbursts that we, kids from Brooklyn, specialized in—and after he said it, I looked at him, said nothing, maybe smiled, but the term immediately burrowed into one of those deep down holes and became an echo, gathering dark, before splintering and sharpening into an insight. Joey was right. We were the Dirtbags of the Universe. We felt ourselves to be so, which amounted to something far more powerful than truth—collectively, we possessed the character of a single raindrop, skidding toward an open sewer, just because.
She was the Last of the Coojettes. That’s what Rob called her. Rob was my mother’s cousin. My father’s nickname for Rob was The Moron. Rob worked as a postman. My father worked as a truck driver for Budweiser. Rob and my father both liked to play the horses and spent a lot of time at OTB. They sometimes went to Aqueduct or Belmont together. They were both, in the eyes and mind of my mother: degenerate gamblers. My mother had divorced my father for this and various other reasons some years ago. Rob had gone out with Christine, the Last of the Coojettes, for about a year, then Christine broke up with him and returned to her ex-husband, Tony, who used to beat her. Christine then got back with Rob six months later, mostly because, as she had told my mother, Tony had broken his promise to never lay a hand on her again. Christine started living with Rob. Rob lived in the same upstairs apartment in which he had grown up with his mother, Terri, and his sister, Gina. Terri had died from lung cancer a half-dozen years back. Gina now lived with her girlfriend, Tracy, in Coney Island. The rest of us lived in Bensonhurst. Rudy, Rob’s uncle, who lived in the downstairs apartment, owned the house. Rob called Rudy, Fruity Rudy, because he was gay, though he wasn’t openly gay in the way that Gina was. Gina was just Gina. Rob’s other nickname, the one used by my mother and Helen, a childhood friend of Rob and my mother: Beluga. They called him Beluga because he was rotund and getting more rotund with each passing year. He laughed when my mother and Helen referred to him as Beluga. He called them The Ditzes. My father called Rob, The Moron, because, as my father said: He’s a moron. He never explained why, or what exactly made him moronic. Chrstine was called the Last of the Coojettes, because she had maintained a look popular among Brooklyn women in the 80s: hair, spray-sculpted high and dramatic, a cross between cotton candy and a bird’s nest, skin-hugging denim jeans, stiletto heels, a consortium of clinking bracelets, gold hoop earrings, and a kaleidoscopic mask made of eye shadow, mascara, eyeliner, blush, and two-tone lipstick. Many women had abandoned this “coojette” look after the 80s, but not Christine, who preserved it into the Aughts, into her forties. The last time I saw Rob was three days ago. I stopped in at OTB to see if my father was there, so I could borrow money from him. Rob said he had been in earlier but had left about an hour ago. Couldn’t stand the losing anymore, Rob said and laughed. Rob both talked and laughed as if he had a frog-inside-a-bottle-inside-his-throat. When I asked Rob who things were going with Christine, he snapped—She left me and went back to Tony. If she wants to get knocked around again, that’s her business. I’m through with her. Those two deserve each other. I told Rob I was sorry and asked him if he knew where my father had gone. I think he said he was going to Lucille’s, Rob said. Lucille was my father’s new girlfriend. She worked at OTB and her nickname, at least among the guys that hung out at OTB, was the Red Devil. That, because of her red hair and what they considered her nasty disposition. I rode the B64 to Lucille’s apartment, found my father there, and was invited to stay for dinner. On the sly, I asked my father if he had $100 he could loan me, but he said he was broke. I lowered my request to $50. Still, he was broke. During dinner, Lucille asked me how my mother was doing. Fine, I said. She still dating that moron, what’s-his-name, my father said. Lucille nudged my father’s arm—Don’t be such a jerk. Jimmy, I said, and yeah, she’s still dating him. The term moron made me think of Rob and I told my father that Christine had left him to go back to Tony. How many beatings does that girl need before she gets it, my father said. Lucille nudged his elbow again, this time harder, and with a glare in her eyes. My father looked at her—What—then turned back to me—Anyway, Rob’s a moron, so whaddya expect? I said nothing and cut into the chicken cutlet I was eating. When my father was married to my mother, and Tony was married to Christine, and they were neighbors and friends, I suspected that my father and Christine were having an affair. Why I thought this, I have no idea. I used to wonder what would happen if Tony found out and confronted my father. In a fight, who would win? Cheater or not, I saw my father as the good guy, and the idea of Tony winning the fight made me feel sick inside. That was a long time ago.
John Biscello 